Wednesday, December 31, 2003

This image could not be published in an American newspaper, magazine, or any other media broadcast, because it depicts American casualties in Iraq. The Bush Administration has decided that this could negatively affect public opinion of the Iraq War and decided to censor all such images. If you are an American citizen, please save this image onto your hard drive and show it to your friends. Freedom of the press is protected by your constitution and you should not give it up so easily.

Aristotle spoke of using "logos" as a means of winning an argument. It is one of the forms of rhetoric, which can be defined as " faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion." Rhetoric is designed as a method of convincing others to bend to your will and to influence public opinion. Luckily, this knowledge has not been lost in our times, thanks to the incredible memory of our politicians. They know that when all else fails, you can run a campaign ad that dumbs down the issues, you can slander your opponent, and you can probably win the votes you need to stay in office for four more years.

South of the 49th parallel, our American friends are getting ready for the Primaries, where the Democratic Party will vote for a candidate to run against Bush in the fall of 2004. It is at times like this that I wish I was an American, just so I could vote against George W. Bush, the cancerous force that is eating away at America's moral character and ruining any hopes for world peace. Sadly, I am Canadian so I must devote my energies to voting against Paul Martin, the Liberal leader with a fondness for corporate rule and a supporter of the ill-fated American Missile Defence Shield.

When I mentioned rhetoric, I failed to offer a concrete example. Here is an ad released by the "Club for Growth", an American non-profit organization that was "...founded in 1999 to elect pro-economic growth fiscal conservatives. That organization forwards campaign contributions from its members to the most free-market oriented candidates in targeted congressional races." It is laden with excellent rhetoric and will be sure to mislead thousands of American voters.

What they are saying is that Democrats want to raise taxes, and since middle-income Americans are going to pay more taxes with a Democrat in the White House, we should obviously vote in a leader who instituted billions of dollars of tax cuts for the rich. Independant studies of Bush's economic policy have shown an alarming disregard for the bottom 80 percent of the American population. The majority of his tax cuts were aimed at the wealthiest individuals in America, specifically those with incomes $500,000 and above. Obviously, the only way to pass off such a tax cut is by convincing everyone that they'll all make a better living that way, and rhetoric makes this possible!

The 30-second "Club for Growth" television ad also associates Howard Dean with several Democratic candidates who lost previous elections. These other candidates failed to win for mixed reasons but it is foolhardy to try and compare the 2004 election to those in the past. By labelling the Democratic party as a lost cause, some swing voters might be convinced to back the winning candidate, and thereby lead their nation into four more years of questionable leadership. Also, in these other elections, the incumbent hadn't put his country into the largest deficit in history (a record $380 billion USD). Bush has been the architect of some of the most questionable acts in American history, including removing two sovereign powers without declaring war, putting his country to the brink of bankruptcy, and failing to capture Osama Bin Laden by wasting his time pursuing pre-emptive strikes and intimidation of "Rogue states".

The "Club for Growth" is not part of the American Republican Party but since the Republicans serve its special interests, the Club is glad to knock down any opponents to GOP rule. Hopefully, the American public will realize the harm that George Bush and his cut-taxes-at-all-costs Republican minions have caused to their great nation. When you cut taxes, you must cut spending accordingly, and by cutting spending, the working class will suffer the most. How many millionaires take the bus? When do you see Bill Gates bleeding in the lobby of an overworked, underfunded charity hospital? Unless we tax the wealthy at a sufficient rate, the rest of us will feel the sting of going without.

My father is fond of saying that if income taxes existed when Karl Marx was writing his manifesto, there would never have been a communist revolution anywhere. Obviously, you must temper your actions with logic and I am not saying that we should blindly vote against whoever supports the status quo, but I think that in the 2004 election, the decision should be simple--just don't vote for Bush! He is a media whore, a man who has never had to go without, an heir to a multi-million fortune, and a former National Guardsman who went AWOL. What he isn't is a leader. Visit Moveon.org for more ammunition.